Mission to Mars

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Movie
German title Mission to Mars
Original title Mission to Mars
Mission to Mars logo.svg
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2000
length 114 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 10
Rod
Director Brian De Palma
script Jim Thomas
John Thomas
Graham Yost
production Tom Jacobson
music Ennio Morricone
camera Stephen H. Burum
cut Paul Hirsch
occupation

Mission to Mars is an American science fiction film by director Brian De Palma from 2000 about a manned flight to Mars . The main characters are Gary Sinise , Tim Robbins , Don Cheadle and Connie Nielsen . De Palma was nominated for the 2001 Golden Raspberry in the worst director category for this film . The film grossed over $ 100 million on a budget of $ 90 million. The film opened in German cinemas on May 11, 2000.

action

In 2020 a group of four astronauts led by Luke Graham will fly to Mars and land successfully on the surface of the red planet. While exploring the Cydonia region , they notice a mountain that appears to be made of metal beneath its surface. As they begin to continue their close-up radar survey of the mountain, a violent, unnatural hurricane emanates from its bright summit and its trunk-like turbulence is aimed at the astronauts. Everyone dies except Luke. Luke returns to the base and sends a cry for help to Earth . A rescue team is hurriedly assembled there to travel behind and look for survivors.

Also on board on the arduous rescue flight are Commander Woody Blake and his wife Terri, co-pilot Jim McConnell and the technician Phil Ohlmyer. Jim, who is still mourning his late wife Maggie, is sent against the will of the mission director Ramier Beck because he knows the nature of Mars like no other.

Jim watches a video again of his wife, who philosophizes that it is the destiny of humans to find other life in other worlds. When the crew then rehearsed the landing maneuver, a “meteorite splinter” pierced the shell - and like a bullet, Ohlmyer's hand too. Oxygen escapes, the internal pressure of the spaceship drops. Working together, they can close that leak and one more crack, but after that, landing time becomes so short that they overlook further serious damage to a fuel line.

When the engines fire, leaked fuel catches fire and a major explosion occurs ; the ship is out of control and unable to maneuver. The crew leaves it and goes into space in spacesuits to transfer to a small orbital supply station. Commander Blake is driven off by his excessive approach speed while attaching the lanyard to the module and orders the others to leave him behind. Terri refuses and tries to save him anyway. Knowing that she would not survive the attempt, Blake takes off his helmet and deliberately kills himself; Terri can just about turn back to the other two.

The three remaining manage a controlled landing with the supply module on the red planet, fortunately very close to the base camp. There they discover that a radiation storm is raging at the site of the accident, while three graves have been dug near the module. Luke Graham was the only one of the original crew to survive in the plant's greenhouse. He shows his colleagues a picture of a monumental, shiny metallic, reclining face on Mars that was exposed by the storm at the location of the mountain. He believes that he only got away with his life in order to be able to solve the riddle. He plays audio signals that the face emits and shows them his attempts at interpretation that have been unsuccessful until then.

The astronauts jointly recognize that the audio signals result in a graphical but incomplete representation of a DNA strand. As an answer to the riddle, they add the missing “chromosome pair” to the sequence and transmit the signals. The face monument opens and reveals a technologically highly developed interior. Jim, Luke and Terri come across a holographic recording of an alien being that reveals the shared history of their species:

Once upon a time, Mars was populated by many living things and a highly developed civilization , until the impact of an asteroid destroyed the ecosystem of Mars ; the Martians fled in spaceships and left genetic samples of their own world in the primordial seas of the earth. This is how a diverse flora and fauna developed, from which humans ultimately emerged . The face was left on dying Mars so that one day they could reconnect with their ancestors.

Jim McConnell does exactly that: he travels after the Martians with a ready-made starship in order to realize his and Maggie's dream of contact with other intelligent beings. The others make their way home and watch as his ship carries him to a distant galaxy .

Reviews

  • The lexicon of international films criticized the “derivative and less captivating script”.
  • In 2018, TV Spielfilm rated the film as a “dramaturgical stray into space ” that “callously” “plundered” elements from the Kubrick classic “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ”.
  • Jeffrey Westhoff wrote in the Northwest Herald on September 3, 2002: "If Brian DePalma's film Mission to Mars were a book, it would have a yellow cover and the title 2001 for dummies ."

background

  • The Mars face Cydonia was shortly after the release of the film on high-resolution satellite photos as a natural geological identified formation, which on closer inspection has little resemblance to a human face.
  • A visual gag is built into the arrival of the spaceship at Mars: the planet, the round part of the ship and a satellite dish form the world-famous " Mickey Mouse " head, the trademark of the Disney studios responsible for production . They also turned the film into an attraction of the same name in their amusement parks .
  • At the same time as Brian De Palma , director Antony Hoffman brought the film Red Planet to cinemas through a first manned mission to Mars. Red Planet was more of an action film than a utopia. Nevertheless, both films competed for viewers. Ironically, neither of them was a box office success, which means that the Mars theme, also due to other productions such as Ghosts of Mars and Species II , was labeled a box office poison in Hollywood , whereas The Martian with revenues of over $ 630 million US dollars in 2015 has proven that it could not have been due to Mars.
  • Another parallel to Red Planet is in the names of the spaceships. These are called Mars One in both films .
  • The seven white rings visible on the floor of the Mars spaceship, each of which rotates vertically and horizontally to the floor, represent a binary counter, each ring represents one bit. Starting with the sequence “all vertical” (corresponding to seven zeros) the counter begins to count. The viewer looks upside down at the bit sequence, since the least significant bit (the most frequently rotating ring) is at the left end of the picture, but the binary system counts from the right. A binary number consisting of seven digits can have 128 values.
  • The shooting took place for the representation of the bare surface of Mars like with Red Planet in Jordan and Ontario , Canada , and partly in the Mels-du-Cinéma-film studios.
  • There are parallels to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey , for example in the design of the two spaceships.
  • In the film, Tim Robbins and Gary Sinise appear as the main actors, which was a challenge for the German dubbing, as Tobias Meister is the regular speaker for both actors. Meister then spoke Sinise, while Robbins is spoken by Stefan Fredrich , who in turn is actually the regular speaker for Jim Carrey .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Mission to Mars. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  2. TV feature film online: Mission to Mars - space adventure - TV feature film. Retrieved June 6, 2018 .